Wanda Shapiro's style of writing beckons the reader with a rare absence of flair, frill, or pretence of poetic license. We are given the immediate impression that we are not in the hands of a philosopher but those of a compulsive living room storyteller, who may or may not be chain-smoking as she goes. There is an immediacy in her voice akin to a fractured dam, beyond which rumbles a fractured innocence (that somehow manages to retain a crisp, if not sociopathic, hopefulness) large enough to engulf us all. Her characters are shallow only as a means of survival, and in this portrayal we find ourselves, unzipped to a gleaming infancy we've lately been tempted to believe never happened. By the final chapter I was touched almost to tears; which truly is a feat of genius when you consider how seemingly idiosyncratic and circumstantially absurd much of the character interplay is going-in, never imagining what a precise and well-intended design Shapiro is labouring with. I don't believe that this novel can be compared to any other.